How to find best Real Estate Deals?

Is your local real estate market hot? Are good real estate deals getting harder to find? If so, you’re not alone.

But this isn’t a new problem. The times when it’s easy to find real estate deals are the exception. The 2000 – 2005 real estate downturns briefly made finding incredible deals as easy as catching fish in a barrel.

But in almost every other normal real estate market, it’s much more competitive. You’ve got to develop a competitive advantage to find real estate deals. The good ones don’t just fall in your lap.

To help you build that competitive advantage, this article will share 5 ways to find good real estate deals in any market. They include:

Create a focused real estate plan

Be the first.

Put more property lines in the different areas

Improve your communication & negotiation skills

Build a better toolbox of solutions for sellers

These are the same principles I’ve used to consistently find deals for the last 15+ years. I hope you’ll find them as helpful as they’ve been for me.

Let’s get started!

#1: Create A Focused Real Estate Plan

“I’ll look at anything as long as it’s a good deal.”

When I hear that answer from an investor, I know they’re not focused enough. Why? Because there’s not a universal stamp on real estate opportunities that says “good deal.”

If you’re not buying enough deals, you should probably start by asking yourself if you’re too scattered and not focused on a specific real estate strategy.

When I help other investors 1-on-1, the first thing we work on is a business plan. We get focused on a big picture strategy, a target market, a niche within that market, and analysis goals for each deal.

The key word here is FOCUS. It’s the secret weapon of real estate investors who buy a lot of deals.

The perfect comparison is flashlight vs. a laser beam. Which is more powerful? Of course, it’s the laser beam. The difference between the two is focus and intensity.

#2 Be the First

Being the first one to offer on a deal can often help you get a “yes” before anyone else has even seen the property. This can help you avoid competition, bidding wars, and uneducated competitors who pay far more than they should.

But being fast is not always easy, so here are four tips to help you increase your speed:

a) Get pre-qualified.If you wait to figure out your financing until after you find a property, you run the risk of chasing after deals that you never could buy in the first place. Additionally, most sellers want to see a pre-approval letter before accepting an offer, and if you need to get that pre-approval after you submit your offer, the competition could swoop in and take the deal before you have a signed contract.

b) Set your criteria.Understand what exactly you want to buy and how much you are willing to pay. This can help you quickly sort through the 99% of listings that don’t match what you want, so you can focus all your efforts on the 1% that matters to you.

c) Create automatic alerts.Be the first to see when a new property that meets your criteria hits the market by setting up automatic email or text alerts with your real estate agent.

d) Offer without physically looking at the property.This final tip is probably more geared toward the advanced buyer, but when I make an offer, I’ve rarely actually looked at the property first. I make a lot of offers, and if I looked at each property before offering, I’d never have time to buy any property. So instead, I offer on real estate based on assumptions and only look once I get into negotiations with the seller. This tip allows me to make offers hours, if not days, before the competition.

Of course, just being the fastest gun doesn’t guarantee you’ll win the battle. Therefore, let’s talk about another strategy for finding hidden real estate deals.

#3 Put more property lines in the different areas

If you had to survive by catching fish, you’d try everything possible to catch more, wouldn’t you?

You’d probably start by fishing more often. Then when you did fish, you’d probably put bait on several lines and put them all in the water at the same time.

Finding real estate deal opportunities is no different than fishing. You need to look for them more often, and you need to put more lines in the water with attractive bait.

This is a very common mistake I see investors make. They don’t seem to realize how many leads they will actually need to generate before they actually get a good opportunity on the line.

You’re likely to get dozens and dozens of non-ideal leads before you get an ideal one. Yet many real estate investors get frustrated because they try to make those few non-ideal leads work.

My recommendation is to create a simple marketing plan. Work backward from the end and decide what actions you need to take in order to find your deals. For example, in order to get just one deal you may need to:

Make 20 offers

Look at 30 properties in order to make 20 offers

Get 100 leads in order to go look at 30 properties

You can check OLX or Quikr for property listing, drive neighborhoods looking for properties, network, put ads on Online Classified, and more to get 100 leads

So, the final step of the break down above tells you the activities you need to do. Those are the fishing lines in the water.

In this way, you can quantify and plan on a day-to-day basis what you need to do to buy more deals. Importantly, whatever your plan you also have to execute it with an incredible amount of hustle.

#4: Improve Your Communication & Negotiation Skills

I think it’s a major misconception that good deals are just “found.” In my experience, very rarely are deals found like in a treasure hunt. Treasure hunt mentality seems to remove the most critical aspect of a negotiation – the people!

Negotiations are instead custom-crafted between 2 or more human beings.

Good deals come about when you solve the other person’s problem. The more acute or painful the problem, the more likely the decision maker is willing to trade their equity in a property to you for a solution.

But human problems aren’t usually solved like fixing a motor on a car. We’re not machines. We’re living, breathing, feeling beings who happen to also have a problem, in our case related to real estate.

So we have to address the human behind the problem as much as the problem itself. Therefore, the same principles that govern any good human relationship also govern a negotiation with the person on the other side of the deal.

What are some of those basic principles?

Empathy

Willingness to listen

Non-judgment

Honesty

Kindness

Yes, you must also be competent and knowledgeable about the technical aspects of real estate (as I’ll discuss in Reason #5). But whenever I’ve advices others 1-on-1, I’ve noticed that as many investors are botching the human side of their negotiations as they are the technical parts.

#5: Build a Better Toolbox of Solutions For Sellers

There are no shortcuts to worthwhile results in real estate or in any business.

The formula that you can’t shortcut is this:

VALUE in → RESULTS out

So if you want more results (i.e. deals, profits, income, long-term wealth), you need to shift your focus from the results to the only variable you can control: the amount and quality of value you’re providing.

As I said in Reason #3, if you don’t first acknowledge the human part of the equation, you’ll never get an opportunity to solve the real estate problem. But once you have earned another person’s trust, then you have the opportunity to offer real solutions.

For example, if you like to offer seller financing as a solution, how competent are you with the paperwork? Can you execute a closing (with the help of a closing agent, of course)? Can you explain the benefits and address the objections with a seller and possibly with his family or his attorney and CPA?

If you don’t have this level of confidence and competence with your tools, fix this by studying and practicing how to use them.

Especially if you’re new or overwhelmed, just choose one tool, get good at it, and then go look for sellers who have a need that your tool is suited to solve.

Start With Yourself to Find Real Estate Deals

It’s true that your specific market will affect your ability to find more real estate deals. But it’s also true that you have a lot of control over your success. With each of the 5 ideas I’ve shared here, you can positively impact your chances of success.

For this reason, success in your real estate investing business ultimately comes from the inside, from a deep-down commitment on your part. You and every other investor face the same market challenges. The question is how you respond.

So I challenge you to commit to the long-run results of finding more deals. And I also challenge you to the personal growth and development that must happen along the way for you to succeed.

Have you struggled to find good deals? What seems to be your stumbling block? If you’ve found good deals in the past, what strategies and mindset helped you the most?